a smile's worth a thousand memories
by billiespiper
Summary: a smile is forever engraved on her face, even with tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping into her mouth / cat-centric with a smidgen of cat/beck and jade/beck/tori


**title**: a smile's worth a thousand memories

**summary**: a smile is forever engraved on her face, even with tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping into her mouth.

**a/n: so angsty wtf is wrong with me. i can't write anything BUT angst. anyway. supershort, but whatever. non-linear.**

/

the hallways fall silent. footsteps cease, and the slam of locker doors suddenly stops. cat looks down the hallway, her heart picking up speed every time she locks eyes with one of her old friends. they stare at her, or more specifically her mouth. cat frowns, but stops when the stitches stretch and pull.

jade, tori and beck watch her from their lockers. tori's fingers are intertwined with jade's behind beck's back, and his arms are around the two of them. they're not sleeping together, but they've formed a sloppy kind of trio after the accident. them against the world and all that shit, you know? andré and robbie sort of just stopped talking after cat's incident, but jade, tori and beck banded together.

cat looks at them, all huddled up, and moves a step forward. beck meets her gaze and presses his lips into a flat line before shaking his head once and leading his girls to sikowitz's class.

cat wants to remember what it feels like to frown and cry without making her mouth bleed.

/

the stereo pumps louder and louder, traveling through her veins and pulsing in her blood. brassy, loud music (dubstep, maybe. all she knows is it's electronic and trippy and everything is falling out of sorts) hits her ears, and it feels like a wave is crashing down on her head & she's tumbling, tumbling, tumbling with the air running out of her lungs and-

"cat? are you okay?"

beck's here! beck with his smiley smiley smiley eyes and his soft grin that smoothes out all the nastyugly creases in her forehead.

"hi beck!" she chirps, stumbling onto him. "i'm so glad- glad you're here!" her words slur together slightly, so it sounds like 'yeer'.

he grabs her gently by her shoulders and pushes her away a little bit.

"you're drunk." he says, not a question but a statement. she giggles before covering her mouth with her hand.

"noo i'm not!" she insists, despite her blood shot eyes and the putrid alcohol on her breath. "really!"

"let's get you upstairs." he takes her petite fingers in his, almost dragging her up the deep red carpeted steps. when they find an empty room in the party-hoster's house (does anybody really know this person? does anybody even care that they don't?), he pulls her down onto the bed. she hiccups.

"i'm really not- i'm not drunk, beck, i swear!" he chuckles, letting his neck go slack and bumping up against the wood head board.

"sure." they sit in silence for a few moments, cat's fingers still curled into his. she leans forward to kiss his shoulders, and presses her lips there for an extra moment. the muscles in his body are coiled up tight.

"where's jade?" she mumbles lazily. beck shifts at the mention of her name, frowning down at cat.

"we… got into a fight. she went home." cat lets her eyelashes flutter closed against his skin.

"oh." she says quietly, thoughtfully. "i'm sorry."

there's a pregnant pause.

"s'okay." he stares at her again, stares at her lips. he's moving closer and closer until-

his lips muffle hers, cuts off her breath. they're chapped and he tastes sort of like that cinnamon gum jade chews incessantly. he pulls off after a moment, blinking slowly, eyebrows furrowed.

"sorry."

the warmth is gone from besides her body, and she frowns.

"where are you going?" beck sighs, frowns.

"i'm dating jade, cat. not you. i didn't mean to- i'm sorry, okay?" cat cocks her head curiously, looking at him with wide eyes.

"oh. i just thought because- never mind." beck rolls his tongue over his teeth and looks at cat for a second longer- hair mussed and bottom lip pink from her chewing on it.

he leaves his flannel in a ball next to her.

/

she's not quite sure what's going through her mind when she does it. does she want to punish herself for being so goddamn cheery and smiley? or does she want to remain that way- a picture of cat valentine with sunshine & rainbows? either way, she takes her lilac kid-proofed scissors and draws them up by her mouth. she pauses for a second, wondering which way, which position, before opening them wide into a 'v' and closing them down on the soft, wet, sensitive skin on the inside of her mouth.

pain rips across her inner cheek and the scissors rip through them. blood immediately oozes down into her mouth, making her saliva taste like salt and rust. fire dances on the spot she's cut, but she dig dig digs her scissors in further until a wide, fake smile is spread across her face, smeared with blood and loose ribbons of skin.

the reflection isn't quite what cat wanted, but she settles for it. it's actually a very grim smile, very grisly. she tenderly touches the wide cut before calmly dialing nine-one-one.

_hello, what is your emergency?_

_well you see, i can't stop smiling. _

cat finds she can not talk. the chatter of the hospital dispatcher buzzes in her ear (_are you okay? a prank? this isn't funny. are you hurt? do you need an ambulance?_), but everytime she opens her mouth, it slips too far until the skin is stretched back towards her ears.

she hangs up the phone, and walks slowly down the stairs, leaving a dripdrop trail of blood behind her.

cat's mother is sitting in the kitchen, head in her hands, paper reams worth of taxes spread out in front of her.

_mom, mom. mommy, mommy._

she taps her mother's shoulder, brighthappy yellow fingernails clashing with her mother's formal black work suit. mrs. (ms.) valentine turns around. she screams.

cat falls to the floor with a thud.

/

she picks out hot pink stitches at the hospital. the doctor frowns at her, but begins poking his scary needle into the start of the gash.

/

"you look like the fucking joker." jade comments, leaning her head against her locker. cat brushes a strand of magenta hair out of her view and giggles, without moving her mouth. she's learning how to do that, you know. it hurts much less than twisting your facial muscles and pulling the stitches that hold her very fragile lips together.

"i _love_ superman!" cat pulls her geometry textbook from her locker and shuts it, spinning the dial so that no stalkers can break into it and steal her tissues.

jade smiles at her for the first time in a week.

/

the box of cupcakes fumbles in cat's grip, and her fingers can't seem to mold around them. tori takes them from her, grinning. she brings the box up with one hand, grabs cat's folders, notebooks, etc. and stuffs them into her backpack before handing the cupcakes back over.

"there you go!" she smiles, shrugging her shoulders and cocking her head like it's the most natural thing in the world.

"thanks!" tori ruffles cat's dyed locks.

"no problem." cat hesitates for a moment before taking tori's hands and wrapping them around the box.

"these are for you."

(_nonono, they're for beck oliver & jade west, 6 each. they're 'sorry' cupcakes_)

"thank you cat! that's so sweet." tori speaks to her as if she's a toddler. then, she lifts the top and pulls out a red velvet one, passing it to cat. "there you go. see you at lunch!"

cat really wishes she'd kept her beck&jade cupcakes.

/

beck ignores her for one month straight. he kisses jade and laughs with tori, but he stares right past her in class or passing in the halls. jade's coming over every saturday, like she used to, and tori gives her a ride home on tuesdays and thursdays. sometimes, they get ice cream. but beck just sits there stoically, nails digging crescent shapes into the back of jade's hands.

it's a monday. monday, the twenty seventh of may when he finally speaks to her.

"hey." he props himself up against the wall next to her.

it feels like butterflies are having a fight in her stomach. wings beat against each other and the effect is swimmy vision and white spots.

"hi." she squeaks.

"i just wanted to- i just… i'm sorry, cat. i didn't mean to hurt you."

she wants to smile so badly right now, wants to stretch her lips tight against her teeth, but she can't. the stitches will pop open and blood will pool on her lips, staining them, and beck will never talk to her again.

"s'okay! i'm all better now." she says airily. one look at him, and cat knows he doesn't believe her.

"yeah...sure. just- if you need someone to talk to, i'm here."

she blinks. still there. blinks again. still there.

"kay kay." cat saunters off, her turquoise jansport hanging loosely off one shoulder.

hey, it's a start.

/

**guys i'm so lame. it took me ten minutes (w/out spell check cause i'm independent, yo!) to find out how to spell "turquoise" the only reason i got it was because i remembered "ho shit! u always comes after q". mad smart, right? **

**anyway, i'm going to be updating a lot: chapter two of macabre fairytales, a oneshot about jade based on the laurie halse anderson book "wintergirls" (asdfgh i lovee that book. i already have like a 1904809347 page long rant on it in the a/n for that story) and some other jade/andré or cat/tori fics maybe? -stepping outside my comfort zone, whaatt?-**

**anyway. hope you enjoyed!**

**:3 layla**


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